George Orwell Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the… Read More Politics and the English Language (1946)
NB: India After Gandhi is a history of India after independence, but it must be said that Ramchandra Guha is among a small circle of scholars to have done singular service to the Indian and global public with his extensive and meticulous research on Mahatma Gandhi’s life. It is gratifying that his work has been… Read More Ramachandra Guha’s ‘India After Gandhi’ – Gujarati translation launched in Ahmedabad
Whittaker Chambers tried to warn us Paul Baumann I recently read Sam Tanenhaus’s excellent new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative hero who, as the subtitle of the book acknowledges, was the voice and guiding light of the political “revolution that changed America.” The impressive, talented, and endlessly combative group of editors Buckley initially gathered… Read More From Ayn Rand to Donald Trump
NB: An important interview about an important book. DS Documents unearthed by Robert Parry and reported in an article entitled When Israel/Neocons Favoured Iran show that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin became an important source of covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, with the profits being invested in Jewish… Read More The People First: Rohini Hensman on Democracy, Resistance, and the Global Left
How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between ourselves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world,… Read More The Great Unread: Goethe’s Faustian life
Translator Deepa Bhasthi’s pick of 12 of Mushtaq’s ‘life-affirming’ tales about women’s lives in southern India becomes the first short story collection to win the £50,000 award Lucy Knight Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year’s International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the… Read More ‘Radical translation’ of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker prize
Some of the Shortest Stories Ever Written: (with thanks to the gentleman who posted them on X) 1. Ernest Hemingway’s Six-Word Story: Legend has it that Hemingway once wagered he could write a story in just six words that would outdo all others in emotional impact. He won the bet. For sale: baby shoes, never… Read More Ernest Hemingway’s Six-Word Story
In this podcast, Purushottam Agrawal interviews Arun Shourie on his latest book “The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts?“. Along with the book, they also discuss Savarkar – his ideas, his hatred for Gandhi and what he thought of himself. Prof. Purushottam Agrawal is a writer, historian, political commentator, public intellectual, former member at UPSC… Read More The New Icon? Savarkar and the Facts. Purushottam Agrawal & Arun Shourie
Instruments of Empire Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History: Basic Books: New York 2024 Reviewed by Ed McNally In the historiographical field of intelligence studies, ideological blinkers abound. The standard account in the American case is that the democratic mandate which brought the Central Intelligence Agency into being through the 1947 National Security Act… Read More The CIA: An Imperial History
A wise and wonderfully enjoyable book on the enduring power of stupidity. “Paul made possible the transformation of the Gospels’ beautiful moral ideal into an anti-intellectual ideology that was enshrined permanently in the Christian scriptures and has since passed into our secular societies. That ideology has attracted a certain sort of mind ever since –… Read More Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know
